Who has the most bitcoins in the world – the answer may surprise you, especially considering that Tesla and MicroStrategy are not on the list.
Lately, analysts say that the share of institutional investors, including Tesla and MicroStrategy, is growing in the cryptocurrency market. Let’s try to determine who has the most bitcoins in the world and how you can get into bitcoin millionaires.
BTC’s market capitalization has surged by a staggering $ 700 billion since late September, but only $ 11 billion has come from institutional investors, according to JPMorgan. The pool of companies that own bitcoin remains very limited. According to surveys, only 5% of CFOs are considering acquiring BTC as a reserve asset.
Who has the most bitcoins?
The maximum emission of BTC is limited to 21 million pieces. According to the plan, this figure should be achieved by 2140, and at the time of this writing, 18.6 million units had already been put into circulation. The total amount of cryptocurrency on the open market is even less, and 4 million coins are considered lost.
BitInfoCharts data shows that only three crypto wallets have balances between 100,000 and 1,000,000 BTC, which is about 1.98% of all coins available. At the time of writing, that amount was the equivalent of a staggering $ 20 billion. These are cold wallets of the Huobi, Binance, and Bitfinex exchanges – BTC, which are securely stored away from the Internet connection.
Let’s look at the next level: there are only 95 wallets that store 10,000 to 10,000 bitcoins, and their total amount is equivalent to $ 113.5 billion, which is 11.6% of the total number of coins. Further distribution is as follows:
- 2,360 addresses own from 1,000 to 10,000 coins. In total, 5.4 million BTC are concentrated on them – this is 29% of the total amount, the equivalent is $ 285.6 billion.
- 13,710 addresses are wallets with several coins from 100 to 1,000. Together they contain 3.5 million coins, or 19% of the total volume, which corresponds to $ 186.9 billion.
- 133,308 addresses – contain from 10 to 100 bitcoins, these wallets contain 4.3 million coins, or 23% of the total emission, equivalent to $ 225.4 billion.
- A staggering 85% of bitcoins are concentrated in wallets with less than 10 BTC, and 40% of them contain between 0.001 and 1 bitcoin.
- Let’s take a look at these numbers in monetary terms. About 14.9 million people own over $ 100 worth of bitcoins. Another 6.4 million people own BTC worth more than $ 1,000, and 2.2 million have crypto assets worth more than $ 10,000. And surprisingly, another 99,485 people are Bitcoin millionaires.
Who cares who has the most bitcoins?
These statistics may seem rather abstract at first glance, but in fact, they show an interesting picture: institutional investors are far from the leaders when it comes to the ever-growing market capitalization of bitcoin, which is now close to $ 1 trillion. Everything rests on the shoulders of private traders who jump onto the last carriage in fear of missing the moment. At first glance, this strategy looks extremely risky, since purchases are taking place at historic highs, but more recently those who bought BTC at previous highs at $ 20,089 have received a yield of 150%.
The list of those with the most bitcoins may surprise you. At the top of the list is the creator of the first cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto. According to preliminary estimates, he owns about 1.1 million BTC, which is likely distributed across several wallets. From time to time, we have seen bitcoins mined during this era move between addresses – and this activity usually scared the crypto markets.
At the top of the list are also government officials. So, Bulgaria managed to get 213,500 BTC back in 2017 – before the cryptocurrency first broke through $ 20,000. If all these coins could be saved until now, then at the time of this writing they would be worth $ 11.1 billion. This would be enough to pay off the debts of the country’s government.
The FBI is also worth mentioning here – the bureau ended up with 144,000 BTC after the closure of the Silk Road website in 2013. True, these coins were sold for $ 334, that is, hypothetically, the organization lost $ 7.4 billion in profits.
Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss occupy a prominent place among private individuals. They became billionaires after spending the $ 11 million they received after settling a lawsuit with Mark Zuckerberg to buy BTC at $ 120 apiece. Since then, the price of bitcoin has risen by 43,200%. Although it is not known how many bitcoins the brothers currently have, they are sitting on a gold mine.
JPMorgan Bank warns that support from institutional investors may not be enough for Bitcoin’s price.
Nevertheless, many analysts are confident that supply shortages will soon begin to be felt, as only 900 new BTC, mined by miners, enter the market every day. And thanks to the support of the Grayscale Investments fund, which is buying up cryptocurrency faster than it is mined, the constant demand will grow to $ 100,000 and more. Moreover, such giants as PayPal and MasterCard have decided to use cryptocurrency in their services, so it is quite reasonable to assume that the army of BTC supporters will only grow shortly.
